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 Over the past several decades a growing number of formerly kick-ass activists have transformed themselves into corporate toadies. Some do it for the money, others for love. The really successful ones do it for both.
The appended Op-Ed by Randal O'Toole recently appears in the Christian Science Monitor and is titled "Government plans don't work". It is a wide-ranging screed against government, government planning and governmental regulation. It is a call for running government as if it was a market-oriented business.
Randal has moved up in the world and left his grassroots background behind. Today he is a successful mouthpiece of the extreme right. And yet one thing about the man never changes. That is his love for user-fees and, especially for recreation user-fees charged by the US Forest Service.
Have a look at the basket of ideology Randal presents. Would you accept the basket as presented? Would you accept any part of it? So why do such a significant number of conservation groups still accept the part
of the agenda nearest and dearest to Randal's heart????
Scott
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Opinion - Government plans don't work
By Randal O'Toole Oct 18, 2007
Portland, Ore. - After more than 30 years of reviewing government
plans, including forest plans, park plans, watershed plans, wildlife
plans, energy plans, urban plans, and transportation plans, I've
concluded that government planning almost always does more harm than
good.
Most government plans are so full of fabrications and unsupportable
assumptions that they aren't worth the paper they are printed on, much
less the millions of dollars taxpayers spend to have them written.
Federal, state, and local governments should repeal planning laws and
shut down planning offices.
Everybody plans. But private plans are flexible, and we happily change
them when new information arises. In contrast, special interest groups
ensure that the government plans benefiting them do not change – no
matter how costly.
Like any other organization, government agencies need to plan their
budgets and short-term projects. But they fail when they write
comprehensive plans (which try to account for all side effects),
long-range plans (two to 50 years or more), or plans that attempt to
control other people's land and resources. Many plans try to do all
three.
Comprehensive plans fail because forests, watersheds, and cities are
simply too complicated for anyone to understand. Chaos science reveals
that very tiny differences in initial conditions can lead to huge
differences in outcomes – that's why megaprojects such as Boston's Big
Dig go so far over budget.
Long-range plans fail because planners have no better insight into the
future than anyone else, so their plans will be as wrong as their
predictions are.
Planning of other people's land and resources fails because planners
will not pay the costs they impose on other people, so they have no
incentive to find the best answers.
Most of the nation's 32,000 professional planners graduated from
schools that are closely affiliated with colleges of architecture,
giving them an undue faith in design. This means many plans put
enormous efforts into trying to control urban design while they neglect
other tools that could solve social problems at a much lower cost.
For example, planners propose to reduce automotive air pollution by
increasing population densities to reduce driving. Yet the nation's
densest urban area, Los Angeles, which is seven times as dense as the
least dense areas, has only 8 percent less commuting by auto. In
contrast, technological improvements over the past 40 years, which
planners often ignore, have reduced the pollution caused by some cars
by 99 percent.
Some of the worst plans today are so-called growth-management plans
prepared by states and metropolitan areas. They try to control who gets
to develop their land and exactly what those developments should look
like, including their population densities and mixtures of residential,
retail, commercial, and other uses. "The most effective plans are drawn
with such precision that only the architectural detail is left to
future designers," says a popular planning book.
About a dozen states require or encourage urban areas to write such
plans. Those states have some of the nation's least affordable housing,
while most states and regions that haven't written such plans mostly
have very affordable housing. The reason is simple: planning limits the
supply of new housing, which drives up the price of all housing and
leads to housing bubbles.
In states with growth-management laws, median housing prices in 2006
were typically 4 to 8 times median family incomes. In most states
without such laws, median home prices are only 2 to 3 times median
family incomes.
Few people realize that the recent housing bubble, which affected
mainly regions with growth-management planning, was caused by planners
trying to socially engineer cities. Yet it has done little to protect
open space, reduce driving, or do any of the other things promised.
Politicians use government planning to allocate scarce resources on a
large scale. Instead, they should make sure that markets – based on
prices, incentives, and property rights – work.
Private ownership of wildlife could save endangered species such as the
black-footed ferret, North America's most-endangered mammal. Variably
priced toll roads have helped reduce congestion. Pollution markets do
far more to clean the air than exhortations to drive less. Giving
people freedom to use their property, and ensuring only that their use
does not harm others, will keep housing affordable.
Unlike planners, markets can cope with complexity. Futures markets
cushion the results of unexpected changes. Markets do not preclude
government ownership, but the best-managed government programs are
funded out of user fees that effectively make government managers act
like private owners. Rather than passing the buck by turning sticky
problems over to government planners, policymakers should make sure
markets give people what they want.
• Randal O'Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author
of the recent book, "The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms
Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future."
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